This is where it all began. There, in Sao Tome, in this “island in the middle of the world” positioned on the equator, off the coast of Gabon, that the Portuguese colonists, who arrived in 1471, opened the laboratory of slavery which was to lead to the deportation of millions of Africans to the Americas. There, on this island which today forms part of the State of São Tomé and Príncipe (200,000 inhabitants), the plantation economy based on the racial organization of the work.
From that time, troops landed from Lisbon and Madeira, at the invitation of the sugar masters, to play pieces that the slaves and the first Creoles would not take long to appropriate. It is these rites, rediscovered in favor of the decolonization movement and the obtaining of independence by Sao Tome in 1975, that the Italian photographer Nicola Lo Calzo has explored over the past three years, as part of a research long-term collective that he has been leading for almost a decade around the memories of the slave trade and slavery. “I seek to understand how these memories manage to be transmitted from generation to generation, through ancient rituals that take on a contemporary identity and political meaning”, he said.
The photographer Nicola Lo Calzo focused on two theatrical practices experienced on the spot as “a creative response by the dominated to the violence embodied by the colonial power”.
His project will go through many more stages in Africa, the Caribbean and America, and it has already given rise to several exhibitions, notably in Marrakech, Lagos, Lille, Lyon, Florence or Amsterdam. It will also soon be the subject, with regard to Sao Tome, of a book published in three languages (Portuguese, French and English) by the publisher L’Artiere, entitled tragedy.
Aged 43, Nicola Lo Calzo, who is also an artist and teacher-researcher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, focused on two theatrical practices experienced on site as “a creative response from the dominated to the violence embodied by the colonial power”, practices that he brought together under the name of “tragedy”, a term used by the inhabitants of Sao Tomé themselves.
Commemorate the ancestors
The first practice the tchiloli, is characterized by a unique repertoirefrom The Tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua and the Emperor Charlemagne. A play that would have been written in the middle of the XVIe century by the Portuguese playwright Baltasar Dias, from the legends of the Carolingian cycle to which the famous Song of Roland. To dance “refined pavans and minuets in the middle of the jungle” wouldn’t it be “a pretext to resist the hell of oppression”, wondered in 2006 the ethnologist Françoise Gründ in a book devoted to the subject.
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